There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.

In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.

Plato

There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.

Thomas Henry Huxley

There was this huge world out there, independent of us human beings and standing before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partly accessible to our inspection and thought. The contemplation of that world beckoned like a liberation.

Albert Einstein

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

Pearl Buck

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but now, as yet, intelligent enough.

Aldous Huxley

Time goes, you say? Ah, no! alas, time stays, we go.

Henry Austin Dobson

To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.

Benjamin Jowett

To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

Albert Camus

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

Brenda Ueland

'Days' has always been strong as an icon in TV history, and it's still going on strong and represents the genre of daytime drama so well. I'm proud to be a part of it.

Alison Sweeney

Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don't wish it were easier; wish you were better.

Jim Rohn

When I got my PhD, it was a time when there were just no jobs for PhDs. Period. PhDs were getting the lowest paid technician jobs, if they were lucky, in any kind of science.

Shannon Lucid